Of course but see you have to interpret the book. You just dismiss all the stuff in it that seems bad. You ignore the people living 900 years or the dude who got all the animals in a boat and sailed around.
Just focus on the all loving guy who wanted to murder all first borns which I’m assuming would have included infants. The all loving guy who will have you burn for eternity if you don’t kiss the ring.
Yeah and now they want to tell me they think all life is sacred. Or that you have to believe in the supernatural or else you can’t explain why you wouldn’t kill your parents.
We’ve done all that on this forum before and it goes nowhere spoiler alert to everyone.
To be fair, believing life is sacred is ultimately baseless without belief in the supernatural. Same with moral judgement of the bible and God. Once you claim there is no objective good or evil your moral pronouncements about such things are dismassable without argument. You don’t even believe in the reality of an inherently evil act. A creator God could end all of existence and you’d only get to remind us that you and it have some different opinions, but you’d have to concede that it isn’t inherently wrong. No acts are, right? Just like we don’t have inherent and real moral obligations to each other, it has no moral obligation to us
Of course if it’s an all powerful creator God, it IS the final inescapable moral authority. Not you. Without or without the real existence of such a being, your moral judgements concerning it mean zilch.
But we don’t need to explore faith to understand that abortion is the premeditated killing of an innocent individual human life. If you accept that, fine. Nowhere else to go after that. After that it becomes an argument about inherent right to life. Well, more like any inherent right. About the existence of any moral obligations.
If it comes down to “yep, it’s an all ready existing human life, but I don’t care,” Ok.
I passingly read that blacks make up like roughly 36% of prison pop, yet 13% of the US pop. But are like a measly 3% of atheists. Whites are 32% of the prison pop while 60% of US pop. Whites are like 82% percent of atheists. In a pluralistic society–ethnically and socioeconomically–with very pronounced racial disparities there’s not much to take away.
Absolutely nothing you posted above invalidates the numbers in the studies or changes/discredits any takeaways
Edit: hell a great takeaway from the numbers you just posted COULD be that blacks wouldn’t be so over represented in prisons if they had a higher atheist rate.
Well it could be not, hence using the world could in all caps.
It’s not ludicrous at all. Atheists, historically, achieve more than nearly all religious groups (I think Jews out perform them normally, but I could be mistaken). Higher achieving groups (atheists, Jews, etc) are hilariously underrepresented in crime
Whites only make up 32 percent of the prison pop at 60 percent of US pop. They make up 80 something percent of atheist. Which are only like 3 percent of the US pop. It’s an white guy club.
Yeah, we’ll extrapolate it to blacks and other racial minorities who have been historically abused and maligned. Extrapolating a club almost singularly comprised of self selecting comfortable non Hispanic white guys to lower income neighborhoods. Not exactly the demographic you expect to see much in prison, period.
Wait? How is that rejecting common sense? The fact that whites are so underrepresented in prison, period, is not even remotely explained by atheism which has only like a 3% representation of the population.
Refusing to accept correlations might exist because 10M (edit: obviously this number is also ignoring agnostics, whom would more than double that number if considered) people isn’t a big enough sample size is rejecting common sense.
By the numbers general whites are 1/2 represented in prison. Atheists are 1/10 represented in prison, and the 1/10 is the most conservative number I have found. Some sources say 1/100.
We also find low crime rates in countries that have higher (than the US) atheism rates. It is hard because atheism correlates with wealth, education and even intelligence. I am not going to say it is a causation, but correlation has been shown over and over.
Not just whites, though. That’s only the beginning. Now you’re looking at income level.
Equalize race and income. How many of those whites are in prison, period. An even smaller amount. And atheism is still a minuscule slice.
Educated white guys with comfortable incomes are even further underrepresented in prison. And atheists are only a tiny portion of even that sub demographic.
Extrapolating that to our pluralistic society at large is silly.
I am not saying that the data is perfect, and without any other factors, but that if I was a theist some of the stats about atheists would be concerning to me. Stuff like education level, intelligence, wealth, crime rate.
There was even a study I read that empathy was higher in countries with low religiosity. It’s like all the things religion promises seem to be happening to the non-religious, which I think begs a lot of questions.